Tag: Game Development

I discovered a new games channel called NoClip it seems to be one of the better gaming channels documenting and interviewing creators. The creator formerly from Gamespot, talked about how game journalism shows was cheap and tacky, plus the ad model is crashing causing bias towards the media created. His reason to make it is here, he wants something different from the usual Big Media Journalism

It takes a really long time to get Good. John took 8 Years of learning how to program before getting hired at Origin.

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I just read on my twitter feed that Unreal Engine 4 now has gone subscription based for $19 a month you can get the full version of the software and start making games. It will take a cut of 5% from your game revenue if you ship a game.

“Anyone can ship a commercial product with UE4 by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users. If your game makes $1,000,000, then we make $50,000.”

Here’s what you get for your $19 + 5%:
– All the Unreal Engine 4 development tools
– Full source code access on GitHub
– The documentation
– Access to a private Q/A forum where Unreal will help you work through the kinks
– Updates

While Unreal has a legacy of high end graphics back in the 90s and early 2000s. Getting a license was almost impossible for an indie dev. Although much progress has been made with the free UDK and Mods. I used to make a few mods in the old Unreal Engine 2004 and a bit on UDK, but I never really liked the tool set and workflows, plus the documentation wiki was crap and horrendous mostly with outdated information. Unless you are a good programmer you are basically stuck moving forward with the tools.

In came Unity3D while I have never sunk deep into it yet the tools and ease of use and price was great for smaller teams. Unity3D disrupted the whole engine licensing biz empowering smaller devs to make cool projects not just for PC but iOS and Android.

Hopefully this version of Unreal going forward will allow the crowd to improve it. I see from some of the screenshots that a marketplace is in the software to compete with the Asset Store.

Similarly CryEngine announced a new Subscription based model for its software “CRYENGINE-as-a-Service Program” for about $9.90 a month

With these new disruptions coming on with game engines. I feel its a great time to pickup some of these tools to learn and be a game developer again. But is this a race to the bottom for the software devs or a marketshare grab? Time will tell.

One thing I feel that these big engines need to catchup is deployment to Linux, iOS and Android. As their legacy has been consoles and high-end PC Windows. Unity may have an edge for a while. I am going to download these tools to try out soon.